2/09/2009

Consider the philosopher ...


David Foster Wallace was especially concerned that certain theoretical paradigms - the cerebral asceticism of modernism, the clever trickery of post modernism - too casually dispensed what he called the "very old traditional human truths that have to do with spirituality and and emotion and community." He called for a more forthright, engaged treatment of these basic truths, yet he himself attended to them with his own fractured and esoteric methods. For instance ... "Let a physical possibility structure be a set of distinct but intersecting paths, each of which is a set of functions on ordered pairs of time world situations, such that for any set of functions in some intersecting paths there is a primary accessibility relationship corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility."